Raluca Mușat (St Mary’s University Twickenham, London), Prototypes for modern living: planning, sociology and the model village in inter-war Romania, „Social History”, Routledge, vol. 40, no. 2, 157-184
Abstract
This article reassesses the concept of the ‘model village’ in the context of inter-war debates about rural development in Romania and in Europe more widely through the story of Dioști, a small locality in south-western Romania that was reconstructed as a model village after a great fire in 1938. Imagined by Dimitrie Gusti, the founding father of Romanian sociology, and realized under the auspices of the
authoritarian King Carol II, Dioști was the outcome of a longer process of imagining a model of rural modernization for Romania that was tightly connected to and influenced by international agendas of reforming and improving rural living conditions. This project offers an opportunity to examine the interplay between the local, national and international levels of rural modernization as they were shaped by the disciplines of architecture, rural planning and sociology. Finally, the article also engages with the concept of the model itself, asking how and why models of rural living were used to produce or manage social change.
This article reassesses the concept of the ‘model village’ in the context of inter-war debates about rural development in Romania and in Europe more widely through the story of Dioști, a small locality in south-western Romania that was reconstructed as a model village after a great fire in 1938. Imagined by Dimitrie Gusti, the founding father of Romanian sociology, and realized under the auspices of the
authoritarian King Carol II, Dioști was the outcome of a longer process of imagining a model of rural modernization for Romania that was tightly connected to and influenced by international agendas of reforming and improving rural living conditions. This project offers an opportunity to examine the interplay between the local, national and international levels of rural modernization as they were shaped by the disciplines of architecture, rural planning and sociology. Finally, the article also engages with the concept of the model itself, asking how and why models of rural living were used to produce or manage social change.
Keywords
development; inter-war; model village; modernization; peasantry; planning; Romania; sociology
160 Rural Transformations and the Idea of the Model Village after the First World War
163 Building the Social Ideal: Sociology and the Model Village
169 From Paris to Dioști: the Politics of the Model Village
179 Land, Resistance and Co-operation
182 Conclusions
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